Sumer

The Sumerian name for Sumer, Kengir (ki-en-gir), the land’s name for itself in the language of its own people. It appears in royal titulary as lugal Kiengir, “king of Sumer,” and in the bilingual scribal tradition it stands opposite the Akkadian Šumeru. The conventional gloss is “land of the noble lords,” parsing the name as ki, “place, land,” with en, “lord,” though the precise analysis is debated and not all of its elements are securely understood; what is clear is that it designated the southern Mesopotamian heartland of the Sumerian city-states.

Kengir is the only name on this page that the people of Sumer used for themselves, and it is the one the world forgot. The name that survived was the neighbors’ word, the Akkadian Šumeru, carried in a royal title and recovered, with the rest of the civilization, only when cuneiform was deciphered in the nineteenth century. Sumer is thus the rare case of a people known to the modern world almost entirely by a foreign name: the first to write, who left behind hundreds of thousands of their own documents, are still called not by what those documents call their land but by what the next civilization called it.

The Akkadian name for Sumer, Šumeru, and the source of the name the modern world uses. It is most familiar from the royal title šar māt Šumeri u Akkadi, “king of Sumer and Akkad,” coined under the Third Dynasty of Ur as a claim to rule both the southern, Sumerian half and the northern, Akkadian half of lower Mesopotamia, and carried by Mesopotamian kings down to the Neo-Babylonian period. Šumeru is an exonym: the Akkadian-speakers’ name for the land their Sumerian neighbors called Kengir, and its relationship to that endonym is uncertain.

Šumeru is the word that became “Sumer.” When cuneiform was deciphered in the nineteenth century and an unknown, non-Semitic language surfaced behind the oldest tablets, scholars needed a name for its speakers and took it from this Akkadian title, so that the first civilization on earth came to be known by the name its successors had given it. The Sumerians’ own Kengir stayed in the tablets; Šumeru, the neighbor’s word, is the one that reached the modern world, carried out of the third millennium BCE by a royal boast about ruling a land whose first people were, even as the title was coined, being absorbed into the Akkadian world that named them.

The Biblical Hebrew name for the land of Sumer, Šinʿār, the plain of southern Mesopotamia where Genesis sets the first cities of the world. In the Table of Nations the beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom is “Babel, and Erech, and Akkad… in the land of Shinar” (Genesis 10:10), Erech being Uruk, the great Sumerian city; in the following chapter humanity gathers “in a plain in the land of Shinar” to build the Tower of Babel; and the name recurs in Daniel for Babylonia. Šinʿār names, from the Hebrew west, the same land the Sumerians called Kengir and the Akkadians Šumeru, remembered as the primeval seat of cities and kingship.

The entry is marked disputed because both the etymology of Šinʿār and its exact equivalence are contested. Some Assyriologists derived it from Šumer itself, a western echo of the Akkadian name, but the sound correspondences are difficult; others propose a “land of the two rivers” or a Kassite tribal name. What is not in doubt is the family it belongs to: Šinʿār is cognate with the Egyptian Sngr and the Hittite Šanḫara, the names by which the second-millennium Near East knew the great southern Mesopotamian land. Hebrew preserves, in the setting of its primeval history, a memory older than the Hebrews themselves, that the world’s first cities stood in a plain to the east, a place the Bible could name but no longer reach.